Today, May 18, 2010, is the fourteenth anniversary of the first airing of "Last Knight" -- give or take local syndication. So it's very appropriate that Chiller has an FK marathon today! (I wonder whether they know?)

The anniversary is also why today is the first day of the FKFicFest Ficathon event on LiveJournal. With a total of 22 stories by 20 authors, the ficathon will release two stories per day (one per day when they are very large) starting today. The first two are now available to read. Players have contributed stories short and long, gen and ship, bright and dark, main characters and guest stars, detectives and vampires, past and present... very FK!

The community is set to "14+" just as FK is rated "TV14." If you do not have a LiveJournal account, you will be asked to tell LiveJournal that you are over 14 to view the community, and then you will further have to click on a little "this post may have adult content" link for each story. I apologize for any inconvenience! Most posts are not rated "adult," and all are clearly labeled with their own ratings, but we wanted the community to welcome "adult" stories, too, and that's what it takes. (If you are logged in to an LJ account, you will skip all this.)

We hope that many players will bring their stories home to fkfic-l after the ficathon event, but not all the players have ever been on the email lists. If you watch the game, you may encounter new-to-you FK authors, as well as old friends and favorites! If you choose, you can leave feedback at the bottom of each story by clicking the "Leave a comment" link.

For the past few years, I've made sure to post a new story of my own to fkfic-l on each LK anniversary. I don't have that this year, because I've put all my hobby time (and more time ~g~) into co-hosting the ficathon game (and writing my story for it). I hope that this post will do as an anniversary tribute, instead. I love FK, and I love you guys. Thank you for still being here.

Thank you! I thought I had an idea of how much time managing the game would take, but I underestimated. :-)

"Last Knight" is nine miles long, by the way. I put it on during my stationary bike workout today, for the anniversary. It was the first time I've watched it straight through in years. I probably do not need to look at it again for a while... although I did get a more technical feel for its structure than ever before. (In the past, I've been too distracted, what with yelling "Stop! No! Hey!" at the characters.)

I have to confess, I still haven't watched it all the way through. Ever. I've seen the beginning, and I've seen the very ending, and both were so emotionally upsetting that I just didn't have the guts to sit and watch the whole thing.

Quite apart from the obvious subjective reasons for disliking "Last Knight", it is one of a handful of episodes ("Let No Man Tear Asunder" is another) with such serious structural flaws that I can only watch when it's necessary for reasons other than personal amusement. Speaking as a writer, it just irks me to watch something so badly constructed.

>"Knowing that just makes me even less likely to be able to watch it with an open mind. So now I'll not only be yelling at the TV in rage, I'll be arguing with it about structure."

I got to have dinner with leela_cat last night, and she still likes and respects "Last Knight" as an episode. She is one of the few with that opinion, but they are out there. Like her, they genuinely think that the episode was a fitting and appropriate way to gather together all the threads as they existed at the end of third season, a suitable bookend to the series, opposite "Dark Knight," given what happened in third season. People with this perspective also usually opine that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the episode's structure, that the fragmentation of the story actually represents the fragmentation of Nick's mental state.